Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

gptzero.me

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 528 posts

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#171

Post by mikkupikku »

orbital-decay wrote: post #100
jklinger410 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the content of the papers themselves are not necessarily invalidated. For example, authors may have given an LLM a partial description of a citation and asked the LLM to produce bibtex (a formatted reference) Maybe I'm overreacting, but this feels like an insanely biased response. They found the one potentially innocuous reason and latched onto that as a way to hand-wave the entire problem away. Science already had…

The wording is not hand-wavy. They said "not necessarily invalidated", which could mean that innocuous reason and nothing extra.

Even if some of those innocuous mistakes happen, we'll all be better off if we accept people making those mistakes as acceptable casualties in an unforgiving campaign against academic fraudsters.

It's like arguing against strict liability for drunk driving because maybe somebody accidentally let their grape juice sit to long and they didn't know it was fermented... I can conceive of such a thing, but that doesn't mean we should go easy on drunk driving.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#172

Post by jklinger410 »

orbital-decay wrote: post #100
jklinger410 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the content of the papers themselves are not necessarily invalidated. For example, authors may have given an LLM a partial description of a citation and asked the LLM to produce bibtex (a formatted reference) Maybe I'm overreacting, but this feels like an insanely biased response. They found the one potentially innocuous reason and latched onto that as a way to hand-wave the entire problem away. Science already had…

The wording is not hand-wavy. They said "not necessarily invalidated", which could mean that innocuous reason and nothing extra.

I really think it is. The primary function of these publications is to validate science. When we find invalid citations, it shows they're not doing their job. When they get called on that, they cite the volume of work their publication puts out and call out the only potential not-disqualifying outcome.

Seems like CYA, seems like hand wave. Seems like excuses.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#173

Post by direwolf20 »

londons_explore wrote: post #153
doug_durham wrote: post #109

Getting papers published is now more about embellishing your CV versus a sincere desire to present new research. I see this everywhere at every level. Getting a paper published anywhere is a checkbox in completing your resume. As an industry we need to stop taking this into consideration when reviewing candidates or deciding pay. In some sense it has become an anti-signal.

I'd like to see a financial approach to deciding pay by giving researchers a small and perhaps nonlinear or time bounded share of any profits that arise from their research. Then peoples CV's could say "My inventions have led to $1M in licensing revenue" rather than "I presented a useless idea at a decent conference because I managed to make it sound exciting enough to get accepted".

That's what patents do.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#174

Post by Nevermark »

With regard to confabulating (hallucinating) sources, or anything else, it is worth noting this is a first class training requirement imposed on models. Not models simply picking up the habit from humans.

When training a student, normally we expect a lack of knowledge early, and reward self-awareness, self-evaluation and self-disclosure of that.

But the very first epoch of a model training run, when the model has all the ignorance of a dropped plate of spaghetti, we optimize the network to respond to information, as anything from a typical human to an expert, without any base of understanding.

So the training practice for models is inherently extreme enforced “fake it until you make it”, to a degree far beyond any human context or culture.

(Regardless, humans need to verify, not to mention read, the sources they site. But it will be nice when models can be trusted to accurately access what they know/don’t-know too.)

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#175

Post by cflewis »

captainbland wrote: post #162

What's wild is so many of these are from prestigious universities. MIT, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge are all on there. It must be a terrible time to be an academic who's getting outcompeted by this slop because somebody from an institution with a better name submitted it.

I'm going to be charitable and say that the papers from prestigious universities were honest mistakes rather than paper mill university fabrications.

One thing that has bothered me for a very long time is that computer science (and I assume other scientific fields) has long since decided that English is the lingua franca, and if you don't speak it you can't be part of it. Can you imagine if being told that you could only do your research if you were able to write technical papers in a language you didn't speak, maybe even using glyphs you didn't know? It's crazy when you think about it even a little bit, but we ask it of so many. Let's not include the fact that 90% of the English-speaking population couldn't crank out a paper to the required vocabulary level anyway.

A very legitimate, not trying to cheat, use for LLMs is translation. While it would be an extremely broad and dangerous brush to paint with, I wonder if there is a correlation between English-as-a-Second (or even third)-Language authors and the hallucinations. That would indicate that they were trying to use LLMs to help craft the paper to the expected writing level. The only problem being that it sometimes mangles citations, and if you've done good work and got 25+ citations, it's easy for those errors to slip through.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#176

Post by cubefox »

gcr wrote: post #21

I was getting completely AI-generated reviews for a WACV publication back in 2024. The area chairs are so overworked that authors don't have much recourse, which sucks but is also really hard to handle unless more volunteers step up to the bat to help organize the conference. (If you're qualified to review papers, please email the program chair of your favorite conference and let them know -- they really need the hel…

Wow...

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#177

Post by autoexec »

londons_explore wrote: post #153
doug_durham wrote: post #109

Getting papers published is now more about embellishing your CV versus a sincere desire to present new research. I see this everywhere at every level. Getting a paper published anywhere is a checkbox in completing your resume. As an industry we need to stop taking this into consideration when reviewing candidates or deciding pay. In some sense it has become an anti-signal.

I'd like to see a financial approach to deciding pay by giving researchers a small and perhaps nonlinear or time bounded share of any profits that arise from their research. Then peoples CV's could say "My inventions have led to $1M in licensing revenue" rather than "I presented a useless idea at a decent conference because I managed to make it sound exciting enough to get accepted".

A lot of good research isn't ever going to make anyone a single dime, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#178

Post by lxgr »

cogman10 wrote: post #2

Yuck, this is going to really harm scientific research. There is already a problem with papers falsifying data/samples/etc, LLMs being able to put out plausible papers is just going to make it worse. On the bright side, maybe this will get the scientific community and science journalists to finally take reproducibility more seriously. I'd love to see future reporting that instead of saying "Research finds amazing che…

> LLMs being able to put out plausible papers is just going to make it worse

If correct form (LaTeX two-column formatting, quoting the right papers and authors of the year etc.) has been allowing otherwise reject-worthy papers to slip through peer review, academia arguably has bigger problems than LLMs.

Re: GPTZero finds 100 new hallucinations in NeurIPS 2025 accepted papers

#180

Post by leggerss »

gh02t wrote: post #97
leggerss wrote: post #78

I don't understand: why aren't there automated tools to verify citations' existence? The data for a citation has a structured styling (APA, MLA, Chicago) and paper metadata is available via e.g. a web search, even if the paper contents are not I guess GPTZero has such a tool. I'm confused why it isn't used more widely by paper authors and reviewers

Citations are too open ended and prone to variation, and legitimate minor mistskes that wouldn't bother a human verifier but would break automated tools to easily verify in their current form. DOI was supposed to solve some of the literal mechanical variation of the existence of a source, but journal paywalls and limited adoption mean that is not a universal solution. Plus DOI still doesn't easily verify the factual…

Thanks for the thoughtful reply!
Post reply on HN